


And Then There Were Three

by TulePubPirate



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Assisted Suicide, Dissociation, Gen, Heavy Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-16
Updated: 2018-03-16
Packaged: 2019-04-01 07:07:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13993056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TulePubPirate/pseuds/TulePubPirate
Summary: Once upon a time, a dear dear friend made me keep writing drabbles about Rude dying. So I made it worse by exploring if Elena had pulled the trigger.





	1. Chapter 1

“Forget it,” Rude spat out, voice choked with blood. 

“But!” 

He shook his head at her. She knew. They both did. The lower half of his body was in burnt ribbons. There were three bullets in his stomach. They were empty-handed, in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes there were no  _buts_  no matter how much Elena wanted there to be. 

This couldn’t be it. Couldn’t be how Rude went. She just needed a Restore, a potion, a way to get ahold of Tseng or Reno–there was someone out there who could  _fix this_  if she just had  _time_ –

“Elena.” His rasping voice cut through her thoughts like a razor. “Don’t have time…to wait for me to die…like a dog.”

“Then what do want me to do about it!?” She shouldn’t be shouting in his face like that when he was hurt, but he just looked _so fucking calm_ , like he had it all figured out and Elena was definitely not in on the loop and–

“End it quick.”

She froze. Slowly following his gaze to the pistol she had tucked in her jacket.

“No.”

“Elena”

“Shut up!”

“Just–”

“Fuck you!” She was panting. Rude was the one laying here dying and she was the one out of breath. Just what the hell did he think he was asking? Just how ready to give up was he?

“Even if there was a way out of this one…” he heaved, closing his eyes. “Ain’t gonna be able to fight…Rather die clean…then left to bleed out slowly…or live useless…”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t answer because she knew what he meant, knew how he felt, knew he was right but didn’t want him to be.

“Elena.”

If she just had  _time_!

“Elena, please.”

“ _Rrrargh!”_ Elena let out a roar, tearing the gun from its holster as she sprung to her feet. Even with her grip shaking as much as it was, there was no missing from this close.

“Promise…to take care of them…for me…”

Elena didn’t answer. She couldn’t find it in her to make promises as she pulled the trigger on her mentor, her friend.


	2. Chapter 2

Elena was sitting, hunched over on a mossy boulder at the rendezvous point when Tseng and Reno found her. Reno raised a hand in greeting and spoke first.

“Elena! Where’s Rude, yo?”

Elena looked up in a daze. Adrenaline had pushed her through to the end of her mission, but then it had ended, and all there had been to do was sit and wait. Giving her memory time to catch up to her. She’d been replaying that moment so many times in her head, living there, existing there in that few seconds, surrounded by the bang and smell of gunpowder. How did Reno not know? Was there even any other memory in the whole world? Hadn't he seen it?

She shook her head, confused. “He’s dead.” Her voice was so quiet. Or perhaps just far away. It was hard to tell.

Tseng and Reno froze, and looked at her again, noticing her expression. Tseng’s brow creased. “What happened?”

Elena’s eyes darted between the two of them for a moment. “I…shot him.” First Reno, now Tseng? Somewhere in her mind, Elena knew they weren’t there, they couldn’t know without being told. But it was such a huge, obvious presence, hanging in the air around them. They should have been able to see it. Death, hanging off her shoulders and dripping down the barrel of her gun. 

She distantly noted the slight change in their postures. They were on alert. For her. In case she was about to turn a weapon on them as well–instincts honed by years of suspicion and subterfuge. 

“Elena.” The name was a command, and Elena’s own honed instincts snapped her eyes up to meet Tsengs’. “Tell me what happened.”

“I shot him. In the head. He…he asked me to. He was…” Her gaze wavered, dropping down to his shoes. “He was dying. And I couldn’t save him.”

Reno’s mouth opened and closed a few times, then thinned into a hard line. Tseng asked her for coordinates, which Elena mechanically told him. Reno left. Returned, carrying cargo, just as the pick-up chopper arrived. The flight back was long. But not quite as long as the days needed for time to begin shaping the numbness into something Elena could mold into a human face again.


	3. Chapter 3

Of all the moments after Rude’s death, Elena hadn’t expected sitting alone with Reno in an SUV en route to meet with Tseng and Rufus to be the worst of them. But it was, no contest. Elena had never felt so miserable or so  _guilty_  in her life.

Sure, they had been alone together plenty of other times that week. They’d had to take care of his body, clean out his desk, argue to Tseng that they were still entirely capable of working, and had been paired up more than once to drown themselves in said work. But they had been busy all of those times. And outside of work, well...

They’d avoided each other.

Now, stuffed in a car together, there was nothing but a distinctively Rude-sized gap between them.

She had a nagging feeling that they were both thinking the same thing: _How can I look after them like he’d want me to when I’m so fucked up I can’t even get myself together?_

And of course neither of them wanted to admit to being so weak that they might need looking after, and neither of them wanted to be the one to strike the first blow and crack the other’s thin veneer of calm. Once one of them went down, they’d take the other with like falling dominoes. Ass over noggin, into the abyss. 

But if Rude had had time to give a last request, they were both rather certain it’d be for them to not be such massive fuck-ups, for Ifrit’s sake. In that regard, they were both failing spectacularly. It was all hanging in the air between them, thicker than the smog in the most polluted parts of the old slums. They’d been driving for an hour, pretending with every bit of effort they could muster (and there wasn’t much else to devote their efforts to, sitting and staring at the endless highway in front of them) that it was entirely normal for the two of them to sit together that long and not say a goddamn word.

Part of Elena wanted to just pop off her seatbelt, open the car door and bail – tuck and roll and then run straight off into the arid scrubland outside the city. 

Part of her wanted to scream at Reno that he was the older one, the senior, and that making the first move was his job, before the two of them dissolved so much they couldn’t put themselves back together again.

Most of her wanted to just be back in fucking Edge already, where pretending everything was just fine wouldn’t be so hard.


End file.
